Between the Lies

by Cathy MacPhail

  So did I, but she couldn’t go now. “NO!” I said it too quickly. I touched her arm. “Just a bit longer.”

  Her face creased in a puzzled frown. “Why?”

  Just a feeling, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. “We can wait a bit longer, can’t we?”

  But the wind was rising, bitter and cold, and already candles were being extinguished, people beginning to drift off. I wanted them to stay. They had to stay. I checked my watch again. Then my phone.

  “Why do you keep looking at the time, Abbie?” Sara Flynn suddenly didn’t sound soft and friendly. She sounded suspicious. “Why are you so anxious for us to stay?”

  “I think Jude deserves a little more time, that’s all.”

  Jude’s dad looks puzzled. “Abbie? Is something wrong?”

  I looked along the street. People were moving away; the moment would soon be gone. I shook my head. I wanted to shout out to them to stay. “No. Nothing. Honest.”

  I didn’t sound honest at all. I sounded guilty. As if I was hiding something.

  “Are you expecting Jude to show up?”

  I should have said yes right then. Said that I’d wondered whether she might have heard about the vigil and I thought she was going to walk towards us, among the candles, like something out of a movie. Or tell them she had messaged me today to say she was coming back. Or tell them I’d had a psychic moment and knew she was coming. But all I could do was check my phone again. “No. I mean, I don’t know.”

  Too late.

  There was hardly anyone left.

  Something had gone wrong.

  I wanted away too, but Sara Flynn wouldn’t let me. She held me by the arm. “What makes you think she’s going to show up tonight?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “Something’s going on here, Abbie. Why do you keep looking at your phone?”

  I wanted to push past her.

  There were only a few stragglers left on the street. It would be pointless now. Pointless!

  “What did you think was going to happen tonight? Were you expecting Judith to come back? What made you think that, Abbie? Is there something you’re not telling us?” Question after question with hardly a second to answer, or to think.

  If she’d given me that second, I could have covered it. Said Jude had messaged me, and that I wasn’t to tell her parents. Or pretend that I thought I had seen her. Anything. Instead, I felt too guilty. I looked too guilty. I had had enough of this. It was all too much. It was meant to be over.

  “Something is going on here, Abbie.” Sara Flynn wasn’t going anywhere now. She saw another story. The camera pushed in my face. I couldn’t think straight. She was getting me all mixed up and puzzled and Jude was meant to be here by now and I couldn’t take it any longer.

  “She was supposed to come. Ok! She was supposed to walk down that street while all the candles were lit and the cameras were here and all the people. She was supposed to make an entrance!” The camera was running. And still I didn’t stop talking. “That was the plan. She was to come back tonight.”

  ELEVEN

  It was as if the sound was turned off. There was a silence. Everyone was looking at me. It seemed a long time without anyone reacting to what I said. I half hoped I had said it inside myself, that no one had heard me.

  And then sound exploded around me. Everyone talked at once.

  Sara Flynn’s voice above them all, sharp and loud: “Abbie, what plan?”

  The camera shoved closer.

  And Jude’s mum too. “She was supposed to come? What do you mean by that?”

  But she didn’t have to ask. Sara Flynn was figuring it all out by herself. “Are you saying you and Judith Tremayne came up with this together? That this has all been a hoax?”

  I was shaking my head, trying to move past her, but she blocked my way. I needed time to think. Time to figure out what I was supposed to say. This wasn’t the way the night was meant to end.

  Where was Jude?

  “You and Judith?” Mr Tremayne’s voice was soft, yet it trembled with anger. “What do you mean, a hoax?”

  “Judith wouldn’t do that to us.” Mrs Tremayne (‘call me Ruth’ she had told me only a moment ago) was shaking her head. “No, Judith wouldn’t do that to us. That would be too cruel.”

  I wanted to lie. Tell them I was mixed up, didn’t know what I was saying, but I had said too much already. And Mrs Tremayne’s eyes were puffy with tears and I didn’t want to lie any more and hurt her. Judith had told me they were heartless. I had seen none of that. All I had witnessed was two people whose hearts were breaking. And I couldn’t take seeing it any more.

  Jude didn’t have to watch that heartbreak. I hadn’t thought it would be like this. I hadn’t realised it would hurt her parents so much. That it would hurt me so much. Why hadn’t she told me?

  All this went through my mind in the blink of an eye.

  “This was all a trick?” Mrs Tremayne took a step back from me, as if I had suddenly become contagious.

  I found my voice at last. “Not a trick… It wasn’t meant to be a trick. She was going to come back tonight, in the middle of all this; you would be reunited with your daughter. Happy ending all round. You would never know. No one would know.”

  “But why did she do this? Why did you do this?”

  That couldn’t be told in a sentence. And why did we do it? I needed time to think.

  Mrs Tremayne gripped my arm, her fingers digging in so hard it hurt. “Where is Judith? Where has she been all this time?”

  “I don’t know,” and that was true. Jude had never told me where she was going to be. She’d said if I didn’t know where she was hiding out, I couldn’t give it away with a thoughtless word or gesture. But she’d said she had a place – a safe place.

  It looked as if the crowd had all come back to the street, surging forward. News of my revelation had spread, whisper upon whisper, growing louder by the second. I could hear them.

  “What’s all this about?”

  “Did she say it was a hoax?”

  “We’re at a blinkin’ candlelit vigil for nothing.”

  “Treating us like muppets.”

  The camera was still on me. I tried to cover my face, to hide it, and Sara Flynn was still asking questions.

  “Did you and Judith come up with this? Was that the plan? She would pretend to go missing, and you would pretend to do your best to bring her back? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

  As the crowd started to grasp the story of the evening, they began to boo. A moment ago they were cheering me, applauding me. And now they were booing. There was nothing but disgust in their eyes.

  “I want to go home,” I mumbled.

  Mr Tremayne took my arm. “No way. I’m calling the police.” I tried to pull apart from him, but his wife took my other arm.

  “You’re coming with us.”

  TWELVE

  The police came. It seemed only moments later. I hadn’t even heard Mr Tremayne calling them. Had someone in the crowd called them? They arrived in a car, which brought a few more neighbours out onto the street to join the crowd. Jude’s mum was still crying in my ear, her dad was shouting, “Where is Judith!” and “How could you do this to us?” Over and over.

  And Sara Flynn bombarding me. “How did you come up with this? Whose idea was it?”

  It all merged into one big buzz of words.

  This couldn’t be happening. I felt sick. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

  I was led into the police car, with neighbours and pupils – they’d all kept hanging about – hissing and booing at me, shouting threats and insults, and even as the car pulled away they were shaking their fists at me, a couple even ran towards the car and starting ramming on the windows, on the bonnet. I was scared the glass would break and they would drag me outside. I was shaking.

  Dad was waiting for me at the station, and in the middle of all this I still thought: he hadn’t made it to the vigil like he said he woul
d.

  “No wonder you didn’t want me there,” were his first words. Almost his only words. He could hardly speak to me, hardly look at me, but I saw that his eyes welled up with tears. Tears of anger and of shame. “How could you do this, Abbie? Why?”

  “It was Judith’s idea,” I told him, and I said it to the police again in the interview room. “Judith had read online about these two girls in America. One had pretended to go missing, and the other had ‘found’ all the clues to eventually trace her. When the missing girl came back, Judith said they were both celebrated. They became famous and it was only years later it all came out that it was a hoax. And Judith thought, we thought, how much better it would work now, with mobile phones and messaging and social media and everything, and she’d come back on the night of the candlelit vigil, and no one would ever know what we’d done.”

  “But why would you want to do such a cruel thing, Abbie?” Dad butted in even when the police officer held up a hand, signalling him to be quiet.

  “Jude said her parents were awful, she hated them, and… and if she stayed away they would realise how much they missed her.” She had told me that, and I had believed her. “And you spend so much time fighting for other people, I wanted you to notice me too. I wanted to do something that would make you see me. Make you proud of me.”

  He gasped as if I’d hit him in the face. He sat back. But it was true; he had to know it was true.

  “Jude said her parents deserved it. They didn’t care about her.”

  “And do you believe that now?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know why she said such a thing.”

  “She did all this to hurt her parents?”

  “No, not just that. She had these friends and they had dumped her. And she was really upset about that.”

  I didn’t mention Andrea or Tracey or Belinda’s names. The police would find out who they were. Jude had been shoved out, deserted, excluded, and I knew how that felt. Not that she had welcomed my sympathy.

  “You haven’t a clue how I feel,” she had snapped at me. So I didn’t tell her about how my mum had died, and my dad had drowned himself in union work and didn’t seem to notice I was grieving too.

  But that day was the beginning of little talks, secretive phone calls and coming up with this plan – while everyone still thought we hardly knew each other.

  “Do you always do what a so-called friend tells you?” My dad wasn’t going to stop the grilling.

  “I don’t think so,” I murmured. I’d never thought of myself as someone who could be manipulated, but if I wasn’t, then I had no explanation of why I had done this terrible thing.

  “Still, you insist this was Jude’s idea?”

  “Ok, ok, mine too. I agreed with it.” I so wanted to reach out and grab his hand but I was sure he would snatch it away.

  The policewoman asked me the next question: “So her parents deserved it, your dad deserved it, her friends deserved it… What about Wiliam Creen?”

  I had almost forgotten William Creen.

  “Someone told me about him. I’d never heard of him. I don’t know anything about him.” And who was that someone? I just couldn’t remember.

  The WPC leaned across the table toward me. “And she was going to come home tonight, welcomed with open arms, and you, you would be the heroine of the hour.”

  Happy ending all round, Jude had said when we planned it. What could go wrong?

  You didn’t come back, Jude, that’s what went wrong.

  “And what was going to be her story when she came back?”

  “She was going to say she ran away because of a fight with her parents.” A fight she had deliberately picked, but I said nothing about that. “And she had stayed away because…”

  “Because why?”

  “She was going to say she thought someone was stalking her, someone was frightening her.”

  “So William Creen was the perfect stooge.”

  I was shaking my head. “No, she wasn’t going to name anyone. She never mentioned William Creen. It was just an excuse for not coming back.”

  “Which just means Willam Creen would always have been under suspicion.”

  I couldn’t stop the tears then. “I know, I know, it was a terrible thing to do, but at the time it seemed…” What word could I use? Harmless? Fun? Nothing fitted. Nothing was good enough. No word was bad enough. I turned to my dad then. “I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  “So where is Judith now? And why didn’t she come back?”

  “I swear I don’t know. She was meant to come back tonight, during the candlelit vigil.”

  Suddenly Dad was shouting at me, “Abbie! If you know where that girl is, just tell us.”

  He was angry. Though I knew he was a firebrand at marches and meetings, I so seldom saw him angry.

  “I don’t know, Dad. Honest. I swear on Mum’s grave. I don’t know.”

  I said sorry a thousand times that night. At the beginning of the night I had been so hopeful. It was going to be over. I had had enough of it by then. I just wanted it to be over. I had hated lying to Jude’s mum and dad. I hadn’t realised how hard it would be, lying to everyone, pretending. A laugh at first, but it soon turned into a nightmare. I hadn’t realised, either, how much I would like people liking me. Or how guilty I would feel that I was fooling them, that it was all a lie.

  And nothing had turned out the way we had planned. I’d be apologising for the rest of my life, because they were all right. We had done a terrible thing, Jude and I.

  It should be over.

  It was meant to be over.

  But where was Jude?

  THIRTEEN

  I didn’t want to go to school the next day. I begged Dad to let me stay off. He wouldn’t let me. He was set like stone. “You’ll just have to face the music,” he said.

  But why should I face the music and not Jude? It so wasn’t fair. So I planned to skidge school. Set off in the morning, pretend to go, then just come back home, wrap myself in a duvet and try to forget. Dad must have read my mind. “Never mind getting the bus. I’ll take you to school.”

  He didn’t even stop on the road so I could sneak away before the school gates. He drove right into the plaza, as close as he could get to the front doors, and drew to a halt in a disabled bay.

  “Aren’t you going to work?” I asked him.

  Dad never took time off work. Even when Mum died he hardly took any time off. I could never understand that.

  “Oh yes, I’m going into work. I’ve got to face the music there too.” He turned to look right at me. “Do you know, yesterday I was that proud of you. People were slapping me on the back, calling you a wee heroine… and now…”

  I hated that I had made him so unhappy. When he looked at me I had never seen his eyes so cold.

  “So you will go to school and you will apologise to everyone.”

  Some of the pupils waiting in the cold for the bell to ring had turned when Dad’s car come to a halt. I’d seen their expressions change when they saw who was arriving.

  I began to breathe faster. “I think I’m hyper-ventilating,” I said, my breath coming in short bursts, “or I’m having a heart attack.”

  “You can’t die of shame,” Dad said. He didn’t even look at me. He kept his eyes fixed on the steering wheel. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I knew he’d only draw away. From somewhere, I found the courage to open the car door.

  There should have been noise in the playground. Instead, the world was silent, as if the mute button had been pressed. All eyes were aimed at me, like daggers. I closed the car door and Dad screeched into reverse, desperate to get away from me. I watched the car until it disappeared down the long drive and out of the school gates. The maroon and yellow ties still hung there, not fluttering now, but drooped and looking pathetic in the rain. I forced myself to start walking, sure my legs wouldn’t hold up. That was when the volume turned up to full blast. I was yelled at, shouted at, called the most horrible names. I
began to run, and it only got worse. They pelted me with cartons, plastic bottles, half-eaten sandwiches, anything they could get their hands on. I ran towards the school entrance, but inside there were more pupils waiting for me. All equally vicious.

  “I cannot believe even you could do that,” Belinda sneered.

  “You’re worse than a monster.” Tracey almost spat the words out.

  I tried to dodge past her but Andrea stepped in front of me. “How could you come up with something like that? You’re pure evil.”

  I wanted to shout back some smart, clever comeback, but I couldn’t, because she was right. What we’d done was evil.

  “I was really beginning to think you were ok. I was telling everybody we’d got you all wrong.” Andrea turned to her friends, “Wasn’t I?” And they all nodded. “I cannot believe what you’ve done.”

  It was Mr Barr who saved me. If you could call it being saved. He came to the bottom of the stairs, his molten-candle face grim. “Abbie Kerr, my office. Now.”

  “Now you’re for it,” Andrea whispered.

  “You’ll get the jail for this,” Tracey giggled. “At least I hope so.”

  Big Belinda snapped after me, “They should throw away the key.”

  ***

  “This is a very serious business, Abbie.” Mr Barr sat at his desk. Left me standing in front of it. My throat hurt holding back the tears. But crying wouldn’t gain me any sympathy, and everyone would think that was the reason for my tears: begging for sympathy that I wouldn’t get. So I stood with my rucksack on my hip, staring ahead. Did I look arrogant? Not the least bit sorry? Bet I did. Habit of a lifetime.

  “You made a fool of everyone, Abbie. A candlelit vigil, school ties on the gates. You used the good intentions of all your friends.”

  What friends? I wanted to ask. The only time I’d had ‘friends’ was while this was going on. While they thought I was doing something wonderful. I had liked that feeling. Now, once again, I had no friends. I had enemies.